Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Jimmy Wales, the founder of the popular Wikipedia, is now planning to barge into the terrain of search engines. He told a conference of software developers the other day that his company Wikia Inc was planning to launch a community based search service. Wikia has acquired web crawler Grub to power the search service. But the real power will rest on millions of anonymous users, who will use their spare time to index and collate searches. Like Wikipedia, the search service will depend on humans and not on algorithms which are used by Google and other popular search engines. "We (will) collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box," said Wales. He added that the new service may change the balance of power in the search terrain. We can take him at his word. YouTube to clean up The free for all in YouTube may soon come to end. The popular website has decided to introduce recognition technology from September

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. is shutting down Yahoo Photos, an online photo storage site, and asking users to move instead to its Web 2.0 photo sharing site, Flickr, a Yahoo official said. In June, tens of millions of registered users of Yahoo Photos will be notified of various options including upgrading to Yahoo's Flickr service or various outside-photo storage sites, according to Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield. Yahoo also will offer consumers the option of loading their photos on competing sites when users are notified next month. Outside sites include PhotoBucket -- the most popular online photo sharing service among users of social network sites like News Corp.'s MySpace -- or more conventional photo printing and storage site such as Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly Inc. or Snapfish, he said. "Flickr will get top-billing, of course," Butterfield said in an interview late on Thursday about the plan to give users multiple alternatives. Butterfield and co-fo